J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

This colour beginning on white wove paper was worked very rapidly and without wetting the paper first, which makes it possible to built up intense colours quickly. It includes some colour trials on the right edge: unusually they are paler than the intensity in the main image. Some washes of colour in this work are now almost invisible, yet can still be seen by their surviving fluorescence when the sheet is viewed in ultraviolet light. For example: a wash of vermilion mixed with red lake, most likely madder by its fluorescence, is present in the sky, which would have looked more purplish in tone, and therefore more threatening. Blue indigo was applied quite heavily in places. At this time, Turner used Prussian blue regularly in order to achieve an intense and bright blue, and it had begun to supersede the traditional indigo in his palette, but in this case indigo gave the desired dramatic effect without the need to add black to a brighter blue.

This ‘colour beginning’ has long been recognised as relating to a watercolour of about 1818, The Loss of an East Indiaman, c.1818 (The Higgins, Bedford),1 which was painted for Turner’s close friend and major patron Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall in Yorkshire2 (see David Hill’s overall Introduction to the present section). Of a similar size, it effectively forms a pair3 with the breezy daylight scene of warships in the watercolour A First Rate Taking in Stores (also Higgins collection),4 reportedly painted in the course of a few hours at Farnley one day in November 1818 when Fawkes is said to have spontaneously requested ‘a drawing of the ordinary dimensions which will give some idea of the size of a man of war’.5 A third watercolour of about the same size, also owned by Fawkes, Man-of-War, Making a Signal for a Pilot off the Tagus (Museums Sheffield),6 may have been part of the same campaign of work.7

While shipwrecks are a recurring theme in Turner’s work, Eric Shanes as discussed the particular subject of the finished East Indiaman watercolour at length, suggesting that it shows the wreck of the Halsewell off Dorset in January 1786, a notorious, prolonged disaster involving the loss of over 160 passengers and crew, which had been depicted at the time by several visual artists in addition to the published written accounts.8 Turner himself referred to in a manuscript poem relating to his 1811 West Country tour; see the Devonshire Coast, No.1 sketchbook (Tate D08474; Turner Bequest CXXIII 56a).9 In the finished design, the rolling deck is carried further up towards the top right, providing an arena for scores of clinging and scrambling figures;10 Andrew Wilton has observed: ‘As an exercise in portraying the horror of a sea storm it is one of Turner’s most interesting experiments, for it concentrates on the plight of the ship’s crew almost to the exclusion of the sea itself’.11 Shanes has described the powerful chiaroscuro of the present study,12 while Adele Holcombe has written of its elemental effect, ‘showing a leviathan half in shadow that appears to roll within a trough of darkness, is one of the most impressive’ of the colour beginnings: ‘It belongs to that category of Turner’s work which fundamentally extends the experience and idea of the sublime by implications of physical immediacy ...; by the membranous texture of the image which recalls the most primary of physical boundaries, that which separates the body from all that is outside it.’13

Shanes has speculated that since Turner ‘customarily elaborated numbers of watercolours in succession ... so that he would never have to wait for them to dry’, the present work may have been painted concurrently with the First Rate as a complementary ‘try-out’, if not the completed version too (the two finished works being exhibited at Fawkes London home in April 1819); this sheet includes ‘exactly the same yellow-ochre visible on the hull of the First Rate’, while the thematic contrasts of a warship at peace and a merchant vessel ‘losing its long battle with the elements’.14 Evelyn Joll has questioned that sequence, suggesting that this sheet’s 1816 watermark allows for the possibility of the East Indiaman having already been completed before Fawkes proposed the First Rate subject; as the former was exhibited in 1819 as ‘Loss of a Man of War’ it appears Fawkes then understood that to be the subject (the vessel is armed, but there are women and possibly children among the throng), but perhaps found the close-up depiction making the ship ‘seem as big as an ocean liner’ disconcerting, hence a subsequent request for a drawing to give a clearer ‘idea of the size’.15

On direct examination, Turner’s inscription appears to the present writer and some predecessors to start with ‘Begun’,16 continuing with ‘for Dear Fawkes of Farnley’. Others, including Finberg, have read it as ‘Beginning’,17 or offered both readings.18 The comment is generally supposed to have been added some time after Fawkes’s death in 1825,19 which affected Turner very deeply (to the extent that he did not visit Farnley Hall again, despite continuing good relations with the family);20 Joll concurs, as it would explain why the reticent Turner ‘inscribed it in a more affectionate manner than he would have done if Fawkes had still been alive and liable to read it’.21 Andrew Wilton has suggested in passing that the present work might have been ‘a rapid reminiscence of the composition, made after Fawkes’s death in 1825, to which the MS comment seems to allude; but it is more likely that the drawing itself was preparatory for the watercolo[u]r and was merely annotated later.’22 Wilton has also proposed another variant reading, suggesting that the scrawled word usually taken as ‘of’ might be ‘at’,23 which would help to support Shanes’s thesis.

The phrase ‘Colour Beginning’ coined by Finberg in his 1909 Turner Bequest Inventory to groupings of colour studies of varying purposes and degrees of finish (most conspicuously Turner Bequest CCLXIII24) may have stemmed directly from his reading of Turner’s inscription here;25 for a discussion of the function of such works in general, see the Introduction to the ‘England and Wales Colour Studies c.1825–39’ section.26 In relation to his ‘colour beginnings’ practice, suggesting that ‘his preservation of a record of that process was surely intentional’, David Hill has considered the wider context of Turner’s phrase:

Technical notes:

An irregular loss measuring some 53 x 42 mm has been made good with similar paper at the bottom left corner and washed to match the tones of the adjacent areas.

Verso:

Blank, laid down on a sheet of white laid paper trimmed to match; stamped in black ‘CXCVI – N’ bottom left.